Star players demanding trades has become commonplace and NBA commissioner Adam Silver isn’t on board.
Silver didn’t mince words in his address to the media ahead of All-Star Weekend.
“Player trade demands are a bad thing,” he said. “We don’t want them to happen, and we’ve got to focus on that and make sure that everyone is honoring their agreements.”
At this season’s trade deadline, Kyrie Irving demanded a trade, and then his Nets teammate followed suit by requesting to be traded specifically to the Suns. All that came just one year after James Harden asked out of Brooklyn.
While Silver is determined to reign things in, he admitted that he doesn’t have a clear solution at this stage.
“You never want it to get to the point where a player’s literally demanding that he goes somewhere else,” Silver said. “And so, you know, again, it’s something we’re discussing in collective bargaining. There aren’t, again, any simple fixes here or else we would’ve done it.”